Atticus Finch, the wise and patient patriarch of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” made a statement that I always emphasize when teaching the novel: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” The message here — one simply stated, but far harder to enact — is that we should strive to understand fully everyone we meet, particularly our detractors, our antagonists, and our enemies.

It was in this spirit that I attended a town hall meeting on Sept. 23 organized by Rep. Michael Speciale and Sen. Norman Sanderson. This meeting was set up specifically so classroom teachers could voice our questions, comments and concerns with our legislators face-to-face — a chance to show our perspective, to help them climb inside our skin and walk around, if only for an evening. After listening to many of my colleagues speak at this meeting, I was moved to stand up and speak myself.

My statement that night wasn’t particularly unique or insightful. In short, I explained that the message educators are receiving from Raleigh is that our profession does not matter. Master’s degree pay has been cut. The Teaching Fellows program has been eliminated. Limits on class sizes and maximum students per day have been abandoned. Overall, North Carolina’s systematic investments in making our state a national exemplar of powerful teaching and learning have been dismantled.

To me, this all boils down to culture. I teach in a school that has been successful because of the culture created there — purposefully and carefully so — since its inception. Teachers are empowered to be creative, to collaborate, and to take risks, always toward the end of benefiting our students. State legislators, whether they like it or not, are also creating a new culture of education in North Carolina — one that turns its back on the strategies that have garnered national recognition and fostered our success. My question at the meeting that night (one that, admittedly, cannot be meaningfully answered in the 60-second window afforded by the town hall format) was how our legislators plan to reorient the culture of North Carolina education back where it once was.

It was energizing and cathartic to finally have my say before those in charge. In the days and weeks since then, though, my fervor has subsided somewhat, and Atticus’ words have come back to me. Speciale and Sanderson willingly sat before a crowd of some of their biggest critics and did their best to make meaningful dialogue out of heated half-questions — my own among them. From inside their skin, what would I have seen? Exhausted public servants desperate for my help? An angry mob ready to discount my every word? Something else entirely? From inside my own skin, what was I missing? Sanderson himself reminded me that the state of education in North Carolina cannot and should not be laid solely at the feet of our current legislators. Today’s decisions are made in the context of those past, and to ignore or oversimplify this point helps no one.

The situation surrounding education in our state — and, for that matter, our country — is more complex than any single stakeholder group can conceive. Legislators alone do not have the answer, but neither do teachers, students, administrators, school boards, parents, or community groups. The only hope we have for improving our education system is to come together with civility toward one another and reverence for our common goal: crafting a more intelligent, creative, critically-thinking generation. We each have to climb in one another’s skin and walk around — miles, perhaps, if that’s what it takes to understand the nuances of this issue.

Herein lies the answer to my own question. How do we shift the culture of education in North Carolina back where it belongs? If we all tried to be a bit more like Atticus Finch, it wouldn’t be a bad start.